Your devices let you type the Apple logo symbol, but it isn’t obvious.

This is what the special Apple logo character looks like typed out: 

Some people will find entering the logo symbol useful for referring to products such as Pay or Music like in Apple’s marketing copies. Others will be pleased to just save a few characters in social media apps like Twitter and Instagram.

As you’ve likely noticed by now, your Mac keyboard lacks a dedicated Apple symbol key despite this special character being actually available to type out on your devices.

Apple logo on foreign platforms

The Apple logo character renders properly across any iPhone, iPad, iPod touch, Mac, Apple TV or Apple Watch. It can be typed using the iOS, macOS and tvOS software. In watchOS, Dictation and Scribble provide no way to enter the Apple logo whatsoever.

On foreign platforms and web browsers like Google Chrome, Firefox and Microsoft Edge, the symbol may show as a simple square, a strange character or something entirely different.

This isn’t Apple’s fault.

Both the Windows and Apple logos are in the private use area of the ASCII extended character set because the standard Unicode set lacks corporate logo characters. Due to different implementations, these special symbols don’t show as visible on other platforms.

Apple logo symbol codes

The Apple symbol is included in the ASCII extended character set with these values:

Decimal: 240

Hexadecimal: F0

Unicode: U+F8FF

TIP: Visit the website Alt-Codes.net to find numeric values of special characters.

Follow along as we teach you how to properly type the Apple symbol on your iPhone, iPad, Mac, Apple TV or using non-Apple platforms such as Microsoft Windows.

How to type Apple logo

Here’s how to enter the Apple logo with your devices.

Mac

To type the Apple symbol on your Mac, use the following keystroke combo:

Option (⌥)-Shift (⇧)-K

The shortcut works with the standard US English keyboard layout.

To visualize character placement on the Mac keyboard, choose the option Show Keyboard Viewer from the Input Source popover in macOS’s menu bar.

International users who rely on world keyboards with different layouts than the standard US QWERTY keyboard can add the US English layout via the Keyboard preference pane and switch to it in order to enter the Apple logo symbol.

As a more elegant solution, create a custom text replacement as outlined further below.

iPhone and iPad

There’s no Keyboard Viewer on iPhone, but iOS include a dedicated feature for entering phrases and special symbols, called Text Replacements. Also found in macOS, it automatically replaces a word or a phrase with custom text, like turning “(c)” into the copyright symbol.

You can leverage Text Replacements to type the Apple logo on iOS:

1) Open Settings on your iPhone or iPad.

2) Tap General.

3) Tap Keyboard.

4) Tap Text Replacement.

5) Hit “+“ in the top-right corner to create a new text replacement.

6) Copy the Apple logo symbol  from this post on your iOS device. Tap and hold next to Phrase, then select Paste from the bubble menu to insert the symbol.

7) Tap next to Shortcut and enter a custom snippet to be replaced with the Apple logo. I use “appl,” but you may choose another snippet (to avoid triggering the replacement by accident, use a unique letter combination which isn’t a part of any common word or phrase).

8) Tap Save in the top-right corner to finish making changes.

Your shortcut will automatically expand into the Apple logo symbol as you type.

Now you can easily enter the Apple logo using your iOS device or Mac into your emails, texts, documents, notes and more—simply hit the Space bar after typing the “aapl” shortcut and the system will replace it with the Apple logo character.

Apple TV Remote app

If you don’t have a wireless keyboard for your Apple TV, use your iPhone for typing:

1) On your iPhone or iPad with iOS 11+, open Settings → Control Center → Customize Controls and tap “+” next to Apple TV Remote.

2) Be sure to set up a shortcut on your iOS device that will replace “appl” with “”, as explained in the iPhone and iPad section dealing with Text Replacements.

3) With the Apple TV Remote widget added to your iOS Control Center, highlight any text input field on your Apple TV using your Siri Remote.

4) On your iPhone or iPad, open Control Center and tap the widget you just added, then choose your Apple TV from the list and enter the four-digit passcode that appears on the Apple TV screen, if necessary. Alternatively, press a notification that pops up on the Lock screen of your iPhone upon selecting a text field on your Apple TV.

The Control Center widget works only with the fourth-generation Apple TV and Apple TV 4K, and requires an iPhone or iPad with iOS 11 or later.

Owners of older Apple TV models are free to download the Apple TV Remote app or the iTunes Remote app from App Store and set it up to remotely control your set-top box. You’ll be able to type the Apple logo and access additional features, like Now Playing and Game mode.

Renaming my Apple TV as TV

Entering the Apple symbol on Apple TV using the Dictation feature is unsupported.

Windows

As mentioned earlier, the Apple symbol is defined in the extended ASCII character set in one of a private-use character points intended for apps and devices that need to display glyphs unspecified by the Unicode standard.

Unicode, however, doesn’t contain any corporate logos as part of the standard character set. That’s why the Apple symbol in a PDF or Word document in most cases won’t show as visible on non-Apple platforms like Windows and Linux.

On Windows, there are many ways to enter special characters. We’ll focus on alt codes which require holding the Alt key while typing a 4-code decimal value.

In certain Microsoft apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, there are dedicated options for entering special characters. To see a graphical representation of special symbols in Windows, open the stock Character Map app (charmap.exe).

In that case, switch to the Baskerville Old Face font in Character Map, select the Apple logo, click Select and choose Copy to put the character on the system clipboard.

From there, you can paste it into other apps using the standard Ctrl-V shortcut.

HTML

The Apple logo or any other special character or symbol can be typed out in your blog posts or webpages by using the HTML entities hexadecimal notation followed by a character’s Unicode hexadecimal value (the Apple logo symbol has the Unicode value F8FF).

To use the Apple logo in your webpage, type the following in HTML code:

&#xF8FF

You should see the  character when the page is rendered in a browser.

Need help? Ask iDB!

If you like this how-to, pass it along to your support folks and leave a comment below.

Got stuck? Not sure how to do certain things on your Apple device? Let us know via [email protected] and a future tutorial might provide a solution.